Twenty Years Later, the Postal Service Is Still Rocking

In the early aughts, the swelling electro-pop number “Such Great Heights” was seemingly everywhere: on TV shows like The O.C., Veronica Mars, Grey’s Anatomy, covered by Iron & Wine in the famed Garden State soundtrack, in countless commercials. The song crystallized the legacy of a supergroup that could have been lost in history but has instead grown exponentially in the last two decades.

It isn’t an exaggeration to say there are few indie side projects that have been as influential as the Postal Service, a band that took cues from the likes of Depeche Mode and Brian Eno and paired songs of loneliness, love, and existential crises with anxious drum machine beats, lush synths, melancholic vocal harmonies. The group entered the zeitgeist right after the indie-rock invasion of the likes of the Strokes and the White Stripes and became the bridge to the popularization of more electro-influenced indie-rock acts that followed like Passion Pit, MGMT, and Crystal Castles. In more recent years, it’s easy to cite the Postal Service as forebears of acts like CHVRCHES and Purity Ring. While the band’s presence may have been somewhat of a fever dream, their one and only album—Give Up—has lived on as an indietronica masterpiece that evolved into a word-of-mouth sensation.

It’s the origin story of the Postal Service—one with the spirit of creativity and collaboration—that has helped shape the band’s legacy. The band, composed of Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard, producer Jimmy Tamborello, and Jenny Lewis, began in 2001 when Tamborello was looking for collaborators for his electronic project Dntel. Thereafter, they began to take their collaboration further, with Tamborello sending Gibbard instrumentals by snail mail and Gibbard returning tracks with vocals and other instruments. “It was the easiest way to work since I lived in Los Angeles and Ben lived in Seattle,” Tamborello told Vanity Fair over the phone from Los Angeles. “So we would just send CDRs back and forth.”

In 2002, they recruited Lewis to add vocals, and she subsequently became a member of the band. The Rilo Kiley bandleader had never seen a photo of Gibbard before she went to pick him up at the Burbank airport and record her vocals. “I asked him to hold a sign that said ‘Gibbard,’ and I had the Rilo Kiley van, this giant 15-passenger van and there was Ben holding a sign that said ‘Ben Gibbard’ in a striped T-shirt. I was like, ‘oh yeah, that’s my friend.’ Hilarious,” Lewis said over the phone from Los Angeles. She spent two days recording vocals at Tamborello’s apartment in Silverlake. “He had a bunch of roommates, and I recorded the vocals in his bedroom with Ben giving me direction,” she recalled. “That was it.”

By 2003, the trio shared their album, Give Up, via Sub Pop Records, which touted singles like “Such Great Heights,” the postapocalyptic “We Will Become Silhouettes” and the maudlin, glitch-heavy “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight.” Because Tamborello and Gibbard were collaborating by mail, Lewis considers Give Up a “very futuristic record.” “That is not something that people were really doing at that time,” she said. “It kind of predicted 20 years ahead of its time without knowing it.” The world caught up, and Give Up went platinum in 2012, becoming the second best-selling album in Sub Pop’s history (Nirvana’s 1989 studio debut, Bleach, took the top spot.) “It informed the landscape of popular music in a way, coming from this independent wing and then infiltrating commercials on television,” says Lewis.

Over the years, the Postal Service has acquired some surprising fans. Gibbard recalls receiving what he believes was an internal memo from Meta where Mark Zuckerberg paid tribute to the band. “It was like Mark Zuckerberg saying Give Up came out 20 years ago. You’ll love that record. Can’t believe it’s been 20 years.’ I was like, ‘I’m sorry. What?’…That was a trip,” Gibbard recalls over the phone from Seattle. When he played with John Cale in 2011, he told Gibbard how much he loved the band. “That made my fucking life,” he says. “I mean, that’s right up there with the most flattering compliments I’ve ever received.”

After years of focusing on their own projects, the Postal Service reunited for a highly anticipated anniversary tour for Give Up in 2013. But by then, Gibbard assumed the project had reached its grand finale. “We didn’t really leave the door open, so to speak, to do more. It wasn’t like, ‘Okay, well, that was great, see you guys in 10 years,’” he teased over the phone. But Gibbard realized he, Tamborello, and Lewis could do whatever they wanted—there were never any rules when it came to the project. To Gibbard, “it’s not a real band.”

“I think part of why it’s so special is because it’s frozen in amber, and then we get to be a band and revisit the songs, the beauty of that moment and the zeitgeist of the record, every 10 years or so,” Lewis said.

Now, the band has gotten back together again this fall, not only to celebrate the anniversary of Give Up with Death Cab for Cutie’s album Transatlanticism, which mines the devastation of a long-distance relationship. The plan, however, initially wasn’t to combine both albums for a tour. But during the pandemic, Gibbard approached his management with not only paying tribute to Death Cab’s LP but the Postal Service’s as well, considering the record’s anniversary was approaching too. While Gibbard thought the two projects should be a part of the same tour, management pushed back. “I was like, ‘No, I have a feeling people will really, really shit if we do them at the same show,’” he recalled. “And I felt very vindicated by the response to the tour.”

For Gibbard, the tour is an ambitious doubleheader. Not only is the leg celebrating Give Up’s anniversary, but the 20-year mark for Transatlanticism. It’s the album that launched the band into the mainstream, with a boost from placements on The O.C. and its soundtrack, something Gibbard will “be forever grateful for.” However, when they were younger, it could be “a little uncomfortable at times. “We, and maybe a lot of people watching from the sidelines, were curious as to whether or not this bump in our popularity was solely due to the amplification of the show or if this music was connecting with the help of the show to people that would still be around after the show is off the air. Thankfully for us, that turned out not to be the case. We weren’t canceled with The O.C.” In fact, he believes Transatlanticism has far surpassed the constraints of its teen-soap launching pad and is more relevant than ever. “The 21st century is impossibly lonely, we are allegedly more connected than we’ve ever been, and yet, we spend less time together. People are having less sex,” he explained.

With Gibbard at the helm of two albums on this tour, is he stressing about pulling double duty? “Famous last words but musical accounting, the show is roughly the same amount of time that Death Cab plays and slightly fewer songs. It’s basically the same amount of work.”

In the 20 years since Give Up was released, there have been plenty of rumors about whether the band would team up for a second album. When the group reconvened for the record’s 10th anniversary for a series of shows, they were, of course, ignited again. With the band hitting the 20-year mark, the question still haunts them: Will fans ever get a second Postal Service album? “No, no, more Postal Service,” Gibbard said before addressing the future of the band’s live shows: “This may be the last time we do this, this may not.” Tamborello quips he “would put more money” on a different kind of project happening between the trio than a new album.

But the band members, Gibbard says, hang out “all the time” and get together whenever he’s in Los Angeles. In fact, the Death Cab bandleader notes that he’s seeing Lewis’s gig in Seattle the night of our call. They definitely aren’t, however, jamming out to Postal Service songs in their spare time. “All of us are so busy with our day jobs that we’re never like, ‘Let’s just play ‘Such Great Heights’ for fun,’” Gibbard said with a laugh.

With this tour, however, Lewis has come prepared with her guitar and drum machine—just for fun. “We might end up having late-night psychedelic jams,” she said. “Slumber party style.”